China embarks on Herculean task: Counting its teeming masses

BEIJING -- It will be a snapshot of China from the snowy mountains of Tibet to its teeming cities, a Herculean effort to answer a question of global ramifications: How many Chinese are there, exactly?

China's fifth national census, already under way in remotest areas of the country, is a statistician's dream.

Six million census-takers, who will delve into issues as personal as whether families cook with gas and have flush toilets, have just a few weeks to knock on 350 million doors.

''It's very exciting,'' said Zhang Weimin, a senior statistician with the National Bureau of Statistics and one of the top officials overseeing the census.

That the census will confirm China as the world's most populous nation is beyond doubt.

At the last count in 1990, China had 1,133,680,000 people. Many tens of millions have been added since then, swelling the population to an estimated 1.26 billion now.

But with questions about family size, number of children, education levels, and even whether households share kitchens and bathrooms with other families, the census will provide a raft of information for government policy planners.

Questions about family housing, how much they paid for their house or their monthly rent will offer insight into rising living standards.

By asking families how many members are working away from home, officials are hoping to pin down the size of China's massive floating population -- an army of around 100 million mostly rural migrants who have left poor villages in search of more lucrative city jobs.

Demographers are also looking to the census for information about China's missing baby girls -- countless female infants aborted, drowned or not reported to authorities by families stuck on the traditional preference for boys.

Recent studies suggest the problem is getting worse, with figures released in January 1999 putting the ratio of men to women at 120 to 100.

The moment of truth is zero hour, Nov. 1.

Census takers who will visit all of China's estimated 350 million households on Nov. 1-15 will ask how many family members there were at that freeze-frame in time.

People who die before the census takers' visit but who were still alive in the first moments of Nov. 1 will be counted. Children born after that won't be counted.

Foreigners are not counted. To beat the approach of winter in Tibet, the census there started in September.

Preliminary results, including the population, the number of women, men and families, will be released in February, with full data available in 2002.

The 1990 census cost $145 million, but this one could cost twice as much, Zhang, the census official, said at a briefing for reporters Friday.

Secrecy is important if census takers are to get the truth from families who have had more children than allowed by China's strict family planning rules, or from migrants moonlighting in cities without papers.

People in China's more conservative countryside may also be embarrassed to admit to previous marriages or to having adopted children, said Zhang.

He said police will not have access to the information gathered and that the census forms would be destroyed after they have been scanned into computers that will number-crunch the data.

Rules are in place to stop officials from using the census as an excuse to expel migrants, and family planning officials -- who police the regulations that restrict many families to just one child -- will not be used as census takers, Zhang added.

''The most crucial element to having citizens declare the facts, especially with regard to issues of personal privacy and sensitive questions, is secrecy,'' Zhang said. Only then ''will citizens dare speak the truth.''

Census takers -- made up of factory workers, local government and village administrators and teachers -- are being given seven days of training followed by an exam to screen out those not up to the task.

They have to be healthy -- each census taker is expected to have to register between 250 and 300 people -- and honest.

Zhang said there have been cases of officials charging villagers for the census forms.